


Don't Give Me Your Sympathy

by raggirare



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 20:28:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2039001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raggirare/pseuds/raggirare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years on, and Sousuke has long since accepted that maybe his first little puppy crush was more than that. Too bad he didn't learn to listen to Rin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Give Me Your Sympathy

Sousuke wished he had listened to Rin.

His sharp-toothed friend wasn’t always right - in fact, he was very rarely right about things he would get overly-defensive and passionate about - but sometimes he had moments of brilliance. Unfortunately, those were usually the ones Sousuke would ignore, even five years on.

Really, he should’ve taken a hint from that fact that it was concerning one of Rin’s friends, and the way the red-head’s expression had fallen from smugness into one of sympathy and worry when Sousuke had admitted just who it was who had caught his eyes - for the second time, considering the puppy crush he’d had on the same swimmer back when they were younger.

(“Sousuke, you really don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“You just don’t.”

“I’m going to.”

Sousuke could see that Rin was holding something back, caught between wanting to tell him and not - or maybe not being able to. But he didn’t push the matter, instead just letting the topic drop and returning to his homework.)

Sousuke didn’t need Rin to tell him anymore, though. He was pretty sure he’d figured out what it was. It was kind of hard to miss the nearly two-metre tall red-head standing in the hallway with the Iwatobi captain pressed back against the wall. It was a strange sight to stumble upon, because the way they stood looked so intimate, and yet they weren’t touching. They were close, with the taller male’s arm bracing him against the wall above Tachibana’s head, and they were talking in hushed tones, lost in their own little world, but they weren’t touching.

(Sousuke nearly punched the wall.)

“Tachibana,” he called the captain’s name instead, a calm mask of emotions over his tone.

Whatever spell the pair were under shattered and Tachibana was left a stutteringm embarrassed mess, his face red when he realized they'd been caught. “Y-Yamazaki-kun,” he managed to get out, pulling himself away from the wall suddenly and urging the male in front of him to step back.

“Sorry to interrupt-“ Though Sousuke very much wasn’t. “-Rin’s looking for you.”

It wasn’t a lie; he really had come in search of Tachibana because Rin wanted to talk to him. It just so happened to work to get the desired affect of breaking up a sight that was probably going to be burned into the back of his eyelids for a long while to come.

The embarrassment fell from Tachibana’s face almost instantly at the mention of Rin and he nodded. “Thank you, Yamazaki-kun,” he said, with that same angelic smile that Sousuke was sure hadn’t changed since they were kids, before he glanced back to the stranger. “Coming, Sei?”

“I’ll catch you up.”

Sousuke blinked but tried not to look too surprised, instead holding his ground as Tachibana nodded and headed past him, back towards the main poolside of Iwatobi SC Returns. Silence followed after Tachibana’s footsteps had faded and it was in those moments that Sousuke finally figured out why there was something incredibly familiar about this guy.

“You’re Momo’s older brother, aren’t you?” he asked, hands slipping into the pockets of his jacket. “Mikoshiba Seijuurou.”

A slight grin pulled across Mikoshiba’s lips and he folded his arms across his chest as he slowly approached. “And you’re Yamazaki Sousuke, aren’t you?” He said with an amused lilt to his tone. “Momo talks about you a lot. He admires you. He admires Matsuoka as well. I’ll have to thank you both properly some time for giving him back his passion for swimming. But I’ve got something else to say first…” Mikoshiba dropped his arms from his chest, drawing himself up to his full height as he closed the gap between himself and Sousuke almost completely, looking down at him. “Stay away from Makoto. Momo’s been telling me about how you look him. He’s already got his future laid out, and there’s no room in it for you.”

Sousuke refused to let himself be intimated and straightened himself out as well, hands still in the pockets of his jacket. He pressed his lips in a thin line and met the other male’s piercing gold gaze. “Is there even any for you?”

(When Sousuke finally returned to the poolside, he was the last one to do so, ending up mobbed by Nitori and Momo and their pressing questions about where he’d been and why he’d taken so long, but he blocked them both out with the singular thought of wanting to punch the sympathetic look off of Rin’s face.)


End file.
